This invention relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to presenting advertisements to users of a social networking system.
Social networking systems allow users to connect to and communicate with other users of the social networking system. Users create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the significant amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system allows users to easily communicate information about themselves to other users. For example, the social networking system generates stories describing actions performed by social networking system users and presents the stories to other social networking system users. In addition to stories, other types of organic content describing social networking system users may be presented, such as status updates, location check-ins, photos, videos, or any other suitable information.
In addition to presenting organic content describing users, a social networking system may also present advertisements to its users, allowing the social networking system to obtain revenue by charging advertisers for presentation of the advertisements. Presenting advertisements to social networking system users allows an advertiser to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade social networking system users to take an action regarding the advertiser's products, services, opinions, or causes. A conventional social networking system selects advertisements for presentation to one or more users based on bid amounts associated with various advertisements. For example, a social networking system selects and presents advertisements having maximum bid amounts to maximize the revenue obtained by the social networking system from presenting advertisements.
A social networking system may present advertisements together with organic content, such as stories describing actions performed by social networking system users. However, presenting advertisements and organic content together divides a user's attention between the advertisements and the organic content, decreasing the amount of user interaction with the organic content, which may decrease overall user interaction with the social networking system. For example, if a large number of advertisements are presented to a user, the user may become frustrated with increased difficulty in viewing stories describing actions of other social networking system users and interact less with the social networking system. Further, a user may spend more time interacting with third party systems associated with advertisements rather than the social networking system if a large number of advertisements are presented by the social networking system. Users providing a high amount of interaction with a social networking system when presented with organic content and advertisements present opportunities for the social networking system to generate additional revenue by increasing the number of advertisements presented to these users. However, this additional revenue is often unrealized by a conventional social networking system, which lacks the ability to gauge a user's amount of interaction with the social networking system.